Todd Harrison explores the demands associated with wartime mobilization.
Recent wars have exposed a reality that peacetime defense planning often understates: Stockpiles are finite, production does not surge overnight, and success in a protracted conflict depends as much on the ability to regenerate combat power as on the ability to win early battles. This report argues that mobilization readiness—the nation’s ability to convert resources into military power at speed and scale—is a central but underappreciated dimension of military readiness. Mobilization readiness rests on four foundations: economic strength, workforce capacity, industrial capacity, and political will. The United States retains major advantages in each of these areas, but it also faces serious constraints, including mounting fiscal and debt pressures, limited industrial depth, accelerating technological complexity, and a fractured political environment. The core policy question is no longer whether mobilization matters, but whether the United States can mobilize credibly and at sufficient speed and scale to deter and, if necessary, prevail in a large-scale, protracted war.
Recent experience in large-scale attrition warfare from Ukraine to the Middle East has refocused attention in national defense on what peacetime planning tends to gloss over. Stockpiles are finite, surge capacity is not instantaneous, the pace of innovation and adaptation is increasingly important, and the ability to scale matériel production and the size of military forces often matters as much as the ability to win early battles. The 2026 National Defense Strategy, for example, calls for “nothing short of a national mobilization . . . on par with similar revivals of the last century that ultimately powered our nation to victory in the world wars and the Cold War that followed.” While previous strategies focused more on the readiness of the forces at hand—their ability to fight tonight (operational readiness), their technological edge (modernization readiness), and the size and composition of forces (structural readiness)— this new strategy evokes a fourth type of readiness that has too often been overlooked in the post–World War II era.
